Should You Or Should You Not Be Using Bioidentical Hormones?

There are more and more men as well as women that are becoming interested in learning about bioidentical hormones. In fact, there is at the same time also much confusion in the minds of these people - what with the Women's Health Initiative or WHI trials adding to the confusion. Since the trials had to be stopped in the year 2002 it has made us wonder whether these hormones are safe to use.

Bioidentical hormones are mostly used for the natural hormonal therapies and more particularly to cure menopause symptoms and they are being marketed either as prescription or even as over-the-counter products that have been tailored to deal with the individual hormonal needs of a woman. Going by the claims being made by the manufacturers of these hormones you would start to believe that each of these hormones are very safe to use and certainly more than those hormones that have be created through standard and FDA certified methods.

To understand more about whether these hormones are in fact safe and also effective you will need to read up on what the experts have to say and for this you will have to find out what the North American Menopause Society or NAMS has to say. According to the NAMS these hormones can certainly provide users with a few benefits but at the same time there are also a few worrying risks to take into account as well.

However, at present, there are still not too many women who have returned to using these manmade hormones because they have in fact started to look for alternative solutions which they hope and believe will turn out to be safer. The need to use natural hormonal therapies is still strong among women and that is why much attention has been focused on the bioidentical versions. These versions are in fact nothing but hormones that are manmade and which need to be exactly similar to the molecular structure of hormones that are naturally produced by a woman's body.

Care should be taken to understand that these manmade hormones cannot be produced naturally be the human body and so require to be synthesized. In fact, bioidentical estrogens are nothing but 17 beta-estradiol and estrone and estriol while bioidentical progesterone are nothing but simple progesterone. They are just micronized in laboratories to ensure that once absorbed by the body the hormones will be easily absorbed.

Hormones that have been produced in the labs and which contain chemically identical properties are obviously well suited for treating women's menopausal problems. However, there could be some confusion in regard to what exactly the term 'bioidentical' really means because it can also be used to refer to describe certain treatments that require making use of customized compounded hormonal mixtures. Furthermore, the term can also mean having to adjust the dose of medication to ensure that achieving a certain specific level of hormones in the body.

This ambiguity is in sharp contrast to what you can expect in the case of using conventional hormone therapies in which the main objective is to simply provide relief from symptoms. As mentioned, the chemically produced hormones do not have any FDA approval and so using them does actually mean that you will be taking a few risks because proper quality control and testing has not been done. This means that there is no way to know just how pure and potent as well as safe the Bioidentical hormones are.

So, it will be in your best interests to pay heed to what major organizations such as The Endocrine Society, United States Food and Drug Administration and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have to say about these hormones.